International collaboration in the IAEA nuclear hydrogen production program for benchmarking of HEEP

The Hydrogen Economic Evaluation Programme (HEEP) was developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to perform economic assessment of nuclear hydrogen production technologies. Yet HEEP is still under update to reflect latest advances in nuclear hydrogen production research and development. This paper presents an overview of HEEP and latest benchmarking results with emphasis on its capabilities. Comparative assessment was performed to examine the accuracy of the calculations. Executing same case studies several times showed accurate reproducibility of the results which assured the consistency of HEEP results. Five generic and detailed case studies with different nuclear power plants and hydrogen generation plants were considered in comparative assessment with the results of G4-ECONS and H2A software. The chronological and financial parameters were also varied through these cases. Furthermore, to demonstrate the capabilities of HEEP, some results of other comparative case studies that were performed by PAEC in Pakistan and AECL in Canada will be highlighted. The consistency and accuracy of the performed analyses confirm the credibility and reliability of HEEP. (C) 2016 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.